What form the book may have eventually taken is, of course, a mystery, but the story appears to be about a woman named Flora (spelled, once, as “FLaura”), the daughter of an artist couple—he a photographer who appears briefly before killing himself, she a ballet dancer—who, at some point, is the subject of a scandalous novel, Laura, written by a former lover. Flora’s beginnings are Lolita-like; it is she who has the encounter with Hubert and, years later, marries an older neurologist named Philip Wild to whom she is marginally faithful. The portions of the draft taken from “Wild’s notes” contain some spectacular prose: “I saw you again, Aurora Lee…. Your painted pout and cold gaze were, come to think of it, very like the official lips and eyes of Flora, my wayward wife, and your flimsy frock of black silk might have come from her recent wardrobe.”

Almost a year ago, the German newspaper Die Zeitpublished four of Nabokov’s cards. Wyatt Mason, who blogged about it at Harper’s, said that “composing on notecards allowed Nabokov to set down his books out of sequence; he said he could see in a flash the whole of a novel and its details, and as notecards accumulated in the shoeboxes where they were stored, Nabokov could shuffle them into final order before his wife, Véra, typed up a more conventional manuscript.”

“The Original of Laura” is short—around eight thousand words—and Knopf is treating it more as an artifact than as a finished work: the book will contain an image of each card—with Nabokov’s impeccable handwriting, edits, and typset notes—above a transcription. A main pleasure here is the glimpse the cards afford of Nabokov’s mind. As Publishers Weekly concludes:

Depending on the reader’s eye, the final card in the book is either haunting or the great writer’s final sly wink: it’s a list of synonyms for “efface”—expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out and, finally, obliterate.